Saturday, December 5, 2015

Mr. Prashant Parameswaran, Marketing Manager - Convenient Meal Solutions, General Mills is an Experienced Marketing professional with over 15 years in Consumer Insights in leading MNCs spanning areas such as Innovation, Brand Marketing and Business Strategy across markets in Asia, Middle East and Africa. He is an expert in the field of getting consumer insights and has given direction to many programs in his organization to make innovation systematic.

Markathon : Considering your diverse work experience
with FMCG, we would like to get an understanding from you, what are these
firms doing to penetrate into the rural markets and what better could they
do?

If you really look at rural India, it
is first of all very important to understand from a ‘need’ point of view what
works in rural villages or small towns in India. If I have a product that sells
well in the urban India then I need to understand whether the same product will
work well in rural India or not, because a rural consumer is ready, they do
have aspirations and emerging needs and we need to find out is ways to fulfill
those needs. Another big challenge for marketers or in fact the biggest
challenge that every FMCG company has to face, is how to reach these consumers
and to tell them about your products.

Raising brand awareness amongst this
consumer base is another challenge in itself because the media penetration in
such areas is very low. Most of them either don’t have radios & Televisions
or satellite connections. But one thing that is changing is the mobile
penetration and I think different companies are and should take advantage of
this shifting scenario because marketers at the end have to send across their
message to the consumer. They should come up with as innovative campaigns as
possible to reach their customers. They can come up with mobile campaigns or
could leverage upon the ‘melas’ that happen in or around these villages.

The
third and the most important thing to take care of, is the distribution
network. Your products should be available to the consumer at the end and I
think all companies that are successful in the rural markets have a strong
distribution channel.So I think these
are the little things that the companies usually do to enter the rural markets.

Markathon: What is your take on the changing digital
marketing space? What new marketing initiatives is General millsplanning to take on this medium?

Couple of things that we are doing: -

Number one, we are actively observing the
conversations and engagement that happens on the digital platform. As there are
a lot of conversations that happen on the social media, there is currently huge
need for something known as ‘social media listening’. It is currently very important
for marketers to follow what is trending in social media.

Number two; marketing on the digital space is
way different than other traditional channels. Digital space is an altogether
different space and unlike other medias, consumers more or less have the option
to skip advertisements and that is why you need to focus on content. You need
to generate content, which the consumers would be interested in watching.

Lastly, Another thing that you need to
understand is how to advertise on different medias, now if we talk about Google
Display network (GDN), which includes channels like twitter, Facebook, YouTube
and what not. This enables you to have different campaign on different mediums
and at the same time allows you to integrate your brand on all these mediums.
We are using Google tools like SQL tools and trying to retarget our consumers
with the help of ‘adwords’ and ‘adsense’. For E.g. If someone is searching on
YouTube ‘butter chicken’, our advertisement in relation to that product should
display on his screen. We are emphasizing on targeting our customers in such
ways. Although we plan on taking Baby steps for now, as digital marketing is an
altogether new media and unlike the traditional media, all of us are trying to
learn from our little experiences.

Markathon: How do you think should companies motivate their
marketeers to innovate constantly, considering you have initiated & led
many programs in your career to drive innovation?

I think it’s not just about motivating
the employees; it’s about the excitement to uncover something, which is a lot
more powerful. For e.g. in general mills what we do differently is the way we
interact with our customers. It is not just a simple step but an entire process
that can’t be easily replicated by others. So we start by identifying ‘jobs to
be done’ and ‘needs’. So if I want to start something in a field of says
‘snacking’, then I go out and understand
what are the different needs of consumers in this space. And out of these,
which is that particular need I want to fulfill, or which is that need that has
the maximum opportunity. Accordingly I work on that one particular need. So I
think as far as innovation is concerned, you need to understand what is that
you really need to work on rather than going out in the market and figuring out
what should I make new.

The second important thing is to engage with
the consumers. In today’s world it is very important to talk to your consumer
and we ‘at General mills’, do a lot to ensure we engage and understand our
consumers. A lot of the innovations for our products came because we
understood, how our consumers cook , what goes on in their kitchen and what
kind of products they use.

The last part, which is very important, is
that it is not just the responsibility of a marketer to come up with new ideas.
It can come from any department or domain of the firm and I think it is our
duty to create a platform where all employees of the firm can contribute.

Markathon: You have said that your professional goal is to build a “Consumer First”
culture in organizations, please elaborate on this goal and it's significance.

We believe that whenever you want to take a decision, see if it makes sense for
your consumer. I think every organization should build an intuitive ability
over the time, to answer what will work and what will not work and we shouldn’t
always rely for all our answers on insights from a market survey. For every
marketing problem that comes our way, our approach shouldn’t be just go and do
market survey. And that intuitive ability would come by continuously
interacting with the consumers and knowing them so well, that at a point of
time you will be in sync with their thought process. An organization needs to
ensure that the only interaction it has with its consumer is not transactional.
You need to talk to your consumer on continuous basis, not only when you need
something out of them.

Markathon: You have also worked with Nielson’s and
since startups are the next big thing in India, what market research techniques
can startups use to get consumer insights as they don’t have big budgets like
MNCs for such expenditure?

It is not always necessary to have that
kind of money to really try and understand something. It could be done at a
very basic level by engaging with your consumers, interacting and even
observing them. As a startup you can always go stand in a mall, observe what
people are buying etc. I think first and foremost is seeking information is
very very expensive, you need to understand what are your challenges? Say you
have some limitations when it comes to investment but that doesn’t stop you
from getting the information that you want. Yes, it might be limited and might
not be as much as you want but you will get information that you can use, that
is point number 1.

Number 2 is that there is so much information available on
social media space where people are talking about their needs, talking about
what they want and people are monitoring that. Today you think about any
startup, say Uber, it became big not because of only information right, it
became big because the founder experienced some problem and thought that there
can be a solution to this problem. He uncovered an unmet need without any
market research at all. This was the information that Uber worked upon, you
don’t always have to do conventional market research to get valuable
information.

However, as you grow as an organisation you do need a lot of
information but it is a gradual process. I am not of the belief that you need a
lot of information to uncover a need.

Markathon: Are there any newer technologies that organizations
are using for market research other than the traditional surveys and interviews
etc.?

Technology is picking up and even usage of
technology in collecting information is picking up. Today, people not only want
accurate information but they also want faster information. A lot of investment
is going on technologies which help collect the information faster.

Number 2 is
that there are also evolved techniques, a lot happening in the neuro-marketing
space where people are trying to understand the impact of various stimuli on
the human brain. These technologies are expensive and hence they will take some
time for becoming the technique used by everyone but the good thing is people
are looking beyond the traditional methods. Surveys are going to be there, they
are important.

The questions is how much we will use the other techniques as
well. As an industry, Market research has been investing a lot in technology
thinking about how they can get better information at a faster pace.

Markathon: Since you are an expert on consumer
insights and like the subject, I would like to know what would you give more emphasis
on Product R&D or market research?

If you see market research as an industry,
as lot of money is invested on what I call as scorecard research which includes
questions like “is it working or not working?”, “am I doing well or not?” I
think now what is happening is that a lot more money has been invested in
trying to develop things at work place. Simply put, more emphasis is put on
developing the right product rather than spending a lot more on testing later
on.

Today companies, General Mills for example follow a practice called launch
and learn where beyond a point we just launch the product and learn about it
from the market and develop the right product. The second thing that is
happening is that if you look at R&D and the market research, they are
coming a lot closer. There is a lot more engagement and interaction that is
happening between them rather than both of them working in silos.

We have done
that in all our products that we have developed. Where it’s not been such that
something is done at the marketing and then we go to the R&D and tell them
to develop a product. Instead both the teams went together to the consumers and
uncovered their needs. I am of that philosophy and that’s worked very well for
us.

Markathon: What would you suggest to all the
budding marketeers who want to make a career in this field?

I
can talk about my experiences, the most important thing that has helped me is listening.
It is important to observe, listen to what is happening around you rather than
forming a particular bias in your mind. You should learn about the environment
with respect to engaging with the consumers. Talk to consumers, look at what is
happening in their lives, and look at how they are living. I think it is
important that you spend a lot of time interacting with the consumers and
putting that extra effort to know your consumers in and out.

The second thing
that has helped me a lot is looking at some of the other brands which have made
it big. What has been their approach, what did they do, you might see some
patterns which you can follow as a marketer. It is important to have that
thirst to know more about the things that other brands are doing.

Also, I
always am more interested in the how than the what. I like knowing how they
uncovered something rather than what they did after uncovering it. From a
competitor’s point of view you should always ask yourself that what you have
done, can that also be done by your competition? Can you do something which
your competition cannot?

It is always important to ask these questions and
never should you follow your competitor blindly. The last thing I would suggest
is that everyone should push their limits and go that extra mile to make
yourselves stand out.

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Launched in April 2009, Markathon is the monthly Marketing magazine released by the Marketing Club of IIM Shillong and was the brainchild of Asit Jain, Saurav Bagchi, Dilpreet Singh, Ritul Singh, Pranab Talukdar & Soumyasanta Roy. The current office bearers are Ashok A, Kamalpreet Saluja, Pallavi, Prateek Gaurav, Shashank Singh Tomar, Sushree Tripathy, Swikruti Panda and Vaibhav Annam. This is the first monthly B-School marketing magazine which is circulated in over 50 B-Schools in India and abroad and has a reader base of over 5000. Made available in a free-to-distribute electronic format, it includes articles which cover a plethora of marketing topics and also has an ad designing competition. Markathon aims to deconstruct marketing jargons to make the subject more accessible to students. Interviews of corporate and academic stalwarts is a regular feature. The issues are characterized by rich images, detailed styling and the cover pages are especially remarkable and lend identity to the whole issue.